A (Social) Business in Motion - What does this mean?!
I was just at the IMPACT conference, and a new term came up --- A business in motion! I loved it. It is dynamic and a living organization! A business in motion is ready to meet customers on their terms, with a complete understanding of each customer, used to create deeper, more meaningful engagements.
Here's what I learned about in terms of the imperatives for a Business in Motion!
5 key imperatives:
- Put mobile first, because this is the first point of engagement for your customers, partners and employees.
- Social Everywhere. Reinvent the way you work in the market -- this is the new norm.
- Reinvent your design and business processes to meet new expectations for instant, seamless and insightful interactions
- Adopt a flexible and secure integration model so that back-office systems can keep pace with rapid change
- Be Insight and Data Driven to uncover opportunities, build efficiencies and make informed decisions
What do you think?
Social Tip of the Week! Turn off Retweets!
Do you follow somebody on twitter who publishes great content but also tends to retweet anything (like anyone who thanks them), thus making it really hard for you to spot the interesting pieces in the mass of tweets? Than try this useful function: To turn off a person’s retweets, go on their profile, click on the little person icon next to the following button and select “Turn off retweets”. One exception: This only works for retweets sent by using the retweet button, not for those with RT at the beginning of the tweet.
Social Business Tip of the Day! LinkedIn Mentions
Social Media Tip of the Day!
Did you know that LinkedIn just announced a new function – mentions – which makes it easier to engage with your network by mentioning connections and companies in conversations on LinkedIn. Just start typing the name of a connection or a company in your status update box or a comment field and select the person from the list that appears in the drop-down.
The person or company you mentioned will receive a notification that they have been mentioned. Mentions will be rolled out to English-speaking members first.
Social Business Governance: Relationship over Rules
Being inclusive means engaging stakeholders early and broadly to build shared understandings and expectations. Responsiveness provides for clear accountability and speed in decision making. The challenge is to build governance structures and processes that accomplish both.
Having a relationship with your employees not just rules makes a huge difference in how successful you are!
Achieving the transformative value of becoming a Social Business involves connecting all parts of the organization (including channels, partners and customers) in new ways. It often requires quite new ways of managing people, flatter organizations, and significant cultural change. While becoming social provides individual flexibility, it’s important that the change achieves the unifying value for the company of the new goals and culture.
A strong governance program facilitates coordinated change. The governance is led by two complementary leadership groups who’s members include the major “organizational structures” (e.g., LOBs, Finance, Supply Chain, HR, Channel Management, …).
The first, the Executive Sponsor Group, defines the strategic linkage and goals of becoming a social business. Members are leaders across the organization. The second is a Digital Council. These are executives who are responsible for the organization-wide, execution creation of the Social Business plan. The representatives are often the social business leaders in their respective LOBs and functional areas, which ensures focus on the vertical and horizontal needs.
The Digital Council focuses on the key areas of a social program:
- Community Management – Provides a common approach to drive change and adoption at and across the LOB and functional level. It includes actions like community management, Content Management, community analytics, and best practices. While the focus is value at the LOB / functional level, the governance processes has a Center of Excellent that shares best practices to create a common social voice and approach across and outside the organization.
- Metrics and Measurement - Covers all elements of data and measurement. Starts with analytics / listening to guide the where and how to engage socially. This includes internal analytics of social networks, expertise, and projects, as well as the external listening and analytics. This group also is responsible for creating and automating the overall program measurements to track success, progress on the plan, and social return.
- Reputation and Risk Management – Focuses on 3 main areas: 1. regulatory risk and compliance(if relevant), social record retention for general discovery, and other legal and financial risks; 2. policies, guidelines and processes for the organization and associates to participate in social media (for example, IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines); and 3. proactively managing the organization’s reputation and having a defined plan to respond to various levels of negative media or emergencies.
- Standards – This group focuses on process and technical standards for a social business. While LOBs, major business functions, etc. require the freedom to build their social programs tailored to their needs, the Standards group ensures that the overall company can be nimble in connecting across boundaries in ways not always anticipated. Standards for brand and ways of connecting with partners, channels, clients, etc. ensure that the company is viewed as coordinated and focused on needs vs. a “collection of parts.” On the technical side, a common social business framework enables the new ways of working.
Social Business Adoption Best Practice #9: Brand Army!
Happy Monday and grab that coffee!!!
Today's Social Business Coffee Break is about forming that important Brand Army!
Let me know your thoughts!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vN8JO6lmvg&feature=youtu.be]
Social Business Coffee Break! Adoption Best Practice: Reverse Mentoring
Happy Monday! This is our 8th Best Practice for Social Business Adoption.
It is all about Reverse Mentoring -- a great best practice!
Tell me what you think!
Happy Friday! What is a Social Business Anyway?
Please forgive me if you know this but I have had so many questions at SXSW on "What is a Social Business" that I jotted down my thoughts to share!!!
If you are 201, please skip but I am hoping this is helpful to a lot of you!!
1. What is social business?
A major change is taking place in social media these days: leading-edge companies are moving from "liking" to leading.
Social media has become an extension of traditional paid media with many companies broadcasting messages, from traditional to innovative. The next step will be much deeper as the leaders recognize that social engagement is an opportunity to redefine the client service experience, be proactive in delivering customer care and differentiate in new ways.
We call this social business. And just as social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest changed the flow of information by helping people share insights, opinions, and news with anyone anywhere, social business is changing the way people connect with companies and inside of them and how organizations succeed.
What is a social business? It's an organization that integrates social technologies with critical business processes to improve the productivity of its workforce and create exceptional customer service.
Forrester Research estimates the market opportunity for social software is expected to rise 60% annually from 2010.
2. How is social business different from social media?
Organizations have quickly learned that a Social Business isn't a company that just has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business means that every department in the organization has embedded social capabilities into their traditional business processes to fundamentally impact how work gets done to create business value. A Social Business utilizes social software technology to communicate with its rich ecosystem of clients, business partners and employees.
Three shifts are creating an opportunity for social technology to create real business value
- Pressure to build and share expertise for competitive advantage
- Increasingly influential and vocal customers
- Growing demand for 24/7 and mobile connectedness
Leaders in every industry are leveraging Social Business technology to disrupt their industries and create competitive advantage. They are improving productivity and unleashing innovation by tapping into the collective intelligence inside and outside their organizations. With social, they're creating a smarter workforce.
3. What are the benefits of becoming a social business?
In a social business, employees are smarter, more loyal, and engaged because their organization uses social networks, collaboration systems and shared messaging services.
A "social" approach enables employees around the world to tap into each other’s expertise and connections. Companies can attract top talent and give employees the social tools they need to work together. Executives can layer analytics on top of social technologies to make sure their companies have the right skills and expertise to meet market demands.
A social business is also one where customer service is exceptional because the company reaches out to customers through social networks, Twitter and blogs in innovative ways and acts on the insights it pulls together about consumers. That way, customer service teams have the insights and the analytics they need to predict and resolve problems before they happen. Companies can dish up more targeted offers to customers and respond more quickly to their problems. R&D can gain new sources of inspirations and insight from customers and employees so that the products customers want are the ones that get to market.
4. Example of social business transformations.
Teach for America: Teach For America, a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with communities to expand educational opportunity for children facing the challenges of poverty, is using IBM's social business platform to help bridge the gap in educational inequality for 600,000 students nationwide. Teach For America's 40,000 teachers, alumni and employees are accessing a digital network built on IBM's industry leading social
networking platform to share best practices and innovative teaching techniques in the classroom, across school districts, and state borders. Teach For America's digital portal, TFANet, allows incoming and current teachers, alumni and staff to connect and share knowledge, resources and guidance to help deepen their impact as educational leaders. All 40,000 corps members, alumni and staff have access to discussion forums, blogs, wikis, videos, and user profiles to exchange information and insight across the organization's 46 regions. IBM social networking technology has allowed Teach For America to build a network and digital experience for its teachers and alumni that includes a resource exchange with over 30,000 user-generated classroom materials focused on classroom management plans and worksheets, lesson plans, and new teaching techniques to help increase efficiency and learning in classrooms across the country. Members can access more than 600 content-specific communities, nearly 20 blogs, and 500 video clips and virtual classroom visits, providing Teach For America members with vital advice and insight from their colleagues to help advance their performance in the classroom.
LeasePlan: LeasePlan, one of the leading vehicle leasing and fleet management companies in the world, is using IBM Connections across the multi-national company of over 40 subsidiaries, in 30 countries and over 6,000 employees. LeasePlan is using IBM Connections for knowledge retention, optimizing workflow, increasing innovation, and transforming business processes. Nearly 800 communities have been formed, 400 blogs, and over 800 forums are all helping the organization decrease the amount of emails sent and received, helping the workforce easily find expertise and saving employees valuable time. Wim de Gier, LeasePlan’s Senior Global Project Manager Corporate Strategy & Development says, “LinkedPeople makes it easy to find people with specific expertise. Employees create personal profiles that include information such as their background, expertise, and links to articles or papers they have written. By searching tags, users can locate specific information and find colleagues suited to answer particular questions. Users can also find questions relating to their expertise that they can answer.”
Electrolux: Electrolux is powered through the innovations of its employees to create products that consumers need. Because of this, the ability for employees to access content and collaborate on the fly is crucial. Using IBM enterprise social networking software, Electrolux employees can now easily find experts and gain valuable insight from information and data. They are engaging in over 1,000 collaboration spaces, including 100 information portals managed by more than 450 editors and visited by employees 15,000 times a month and 9,000 times a day.
CEMEX: Speeding innovation and time to market
CEMEX is the third largest building materials company in the world, with employees in 50 countries. To meet business challenges, it had to bring its global community closer together, so it created a social network initiative, called Shift, for open collaboration across its entire workforce. Within a year, over 20,000 employees were engaged, over 500 communities had formed, nine global innovation initiatives were underway -- and ideas started flowing around the world among specialists in all areas and levels of the company. Wikis, blogs and communities became links between operating units around the world, and the collaboration among employees led to impressive results -- for instance, the launch in under four months of the first global brand of CEMEX's Ready Mix special product. If the same level of collaboration now enabled by Shift were conducted today through traditional meetings by phone and travel, CEMEX would be spending an additional US$0.5 to US$1 million per year.
Social Business Coffee Break On Adoption from #SXSW! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz
Happy Monday in the Great Austin Texas!
Today we are on step #7 of the Top 10 Best practices for Social Business Adoption!
As a reminder, here are my top 10!
So here's the best practice on Motivation!!
Adoption Best Practice #7! Motivation!
Social Business Tip of the Day: Sentiment Matters! #socialbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibmconnect
What is Sentiment? Per the Free Online Dictionary, Sentiment is the measurement of thought, view, or attitude, especially one based mainly on emotion instead of reason. So really, a view on whether someone is positive or negative about a company, brand, or idea that is in the blogosphere.
Sentiment is the way that people view what you are doing either positively or negatively. A Social Business needs to be able to analyze sentiment and filter by concepts, hot words and media sets to have a complete comparative analysis by comparing positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent sentiment.
Sentiment Analysis helps a Social Business make evidence-based messaging decisions with analysis into consumer and stakeholder sentiment. It adds value in assessing precision trends and changes in perception of your corporate reputation and reaction to campaigns.
In addition, it can help you identify and target new channels to drive greater advocacy of your products and services with key influencers based on an analysis of sentiment For example, the effectiveness of your campaigns’ messages and their impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions as well as the resonance and believability of their promise is valuable information.